Chasing An Alzheimer's Cure

Drugs

Eventually, medicine at large is going to wake up. It won’t be an easy task, but it has to happen. Someday.

With the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on both the academic and professional aspects of medicine, largely controlling the way it’s researched and practiced, it’s going to take a very great deal of work.

But the time for patiently waiting for results has passed.

One of only two medicines approved to “treat” Alzheimer’s, Memantine (trade name Namenda) was the prescription written by her doctor immediately upon deciding upon his diagnosis last March. Now, Namenda, like all other big-time prescription drugs, has side effects. As we were told it would, it caused some involuntary popping in her jaw, primarily in her sleep. She also lost quite a bit of hair, with it coming out almost in clumps when I combed it out after her showers. Not cool, but also not crazy bad, as side effects go. Assuming that the medicine actually works, of course.

Yeah, right.

The goal of the meds, said the doctor, is to try to slow her decline. Hopeful and not having yet done any research, we acceded. More accurately, I acceded. At this point, Jacquelynn was both terrified and deeply in denial, acquiescing to my recommendations blindly (which honestly speaks more profoundly to her declined state than any other example I can imagine).

Jacquelynn’s decline continued unabated, if not accelerated.

Jacquelynn was on one other prescription at the time, which had been initiated during her third stay at the hospital. It is (she’s still taking it daily) Risperidone (Risperdal), an antipsychotic administered to help curb her “disconnects” as described in my post The Other Side Of Dementia. The current program is to render it unnecessary by the time her current scrip runs out.

I have great expectations that we’ll accomplish exactly that. One reason that I’m confident in this is the primary side effect, only discovered through my own research (never disclosed at any time by the medical professionals dispensing it) of Memantine; hallucinations, seeing and hearing people and things that are not there.

When her Namenda prescription expired, I did not seek a renewal.

When her current Risperidone scrip runs out, I will not seek a renewal of it, either. With the progress she’s already making, and with all the Namenda (presumably) out of her system by then, we’re going to take a BIG step forward and cease taking the last psychoactive of her medications. I’m (we’re) a little nervous, but we’re also confident and determined.

The rest of this trip, this journey, this quest, to reverse the damage done to her body and brain, will be accomplished without the “benefit” of psychoactive medications.

They don’t help. They CANNOT help. There will never be a pill that cures or even significantly addresses all the possible causes and contributing factors of Alzheimer’s.

The drug companies probably know this by now, but they damned sure aren’t going to admit it. Because, as we all know, “treating” a patient is a hell of a lot more profitable than curing them.

We’re curing Jacquelynn, and we’re going to show the world that curing Alzheimer’s and eventually so many other “diseases” isn’t about a pill, and it isn’t about treating symptoms; it’s about the patient, and treating the entire bioorganization that is an individual human being.

So you know, since getting off the Memantine, Jacquelynn’s hair loss has completely ceased and her hair is thickening and beautiful. I very much enjoy shampooing, combing it out, and drying it for her.